One of the most rewarding moments of my life came when my wife started teaching one of my books in her college classroom. It wasn’t something I asked her to do or ever expected. She decided on her own that my short business parable, Endless Encores, was a good fit for her English language learners to be exposed to my particular take on management practices.
I can’t well enough convey the joy I experienced visiting her class on occasion as the guest author, usually surprising her students. If you ever want a jolt of self-confidence, listen to a group of others talk favorably about something you’ve written and what it means to them. There then came a point in the discussion where my wife quoted one line which she said was her favorite in the book:
”Hope is the strength that keeps us going.”
I never thought of it as particularly profound or even important. In the context it appears, it’s a bit of a throwaway phrase to transition to the next set of reflections. That’s the thing about writing, once you put the words in front of others they aren’t yours anymore. They belong to others and whatever resonance they may carry is beyond your control. We’ve all experienced that in song lyrics, poetry, and similar expressions. What we read and hear is often more significant than what the writer might have intended.
Hope is as good a proxy for interpretation as any abstract idea. Hope is enlightening, uplifting, motivating, and rejuvenating.
When I think about hope, I think about optimism. I think about all the daunting challenges we face in the world and why we don’t throw in the towel and admit defeat. I think about the more specific problems that land on my desk and whether it’s sensible to think about effectively meeting the needs of all of them.
Hope is a universal theme with centuries of literature beckoning its light. Hope can be melodramatic and miscast as a broad archetype, but it is seldom invoked without some kind of passionate foundation. Hope is resilience, not bluster. Unless misappropriated, it is not silly or trivial. Hope is meant to be heartfelt, which gives it credibility and sometimes surreal power.
We call upon hope when we are down, when we are exhausted, when answers are not apparent. We often look to hope when we are lost or wandering. We can come to hope as a first or last resort when more logical or empirical paths elude us.
For me, hope is not cynical. It’s not sardonic. It’s less an argument and more a rallying cry. It can bring us together because it is understandable and limitless. The emotion is complex, but the unifying impact is tangible.
While hope is too often in short supply, in dire times it is difficult to dismiss in significance. As I think about so many of the impossible conflicts surrounding us, I return to hope for its healing power. Hope is important, sometimes essential, regularly underrated in consequence. If your work involves motivating others, hope is always in your toolbox. I am not embarrassed to say it is high on my radar as a unifying force when the opportunity is relevant.
Maybe that’s why I wrote that simple line so many years ago and why my wife chose to share it every semester with her students. The lack of intention on my part is perhaps central to its celebration.
Hope is the strength that keeps us going. If I could say it better today I would.
When I started writing this blog more than thirteen years ago, I never intended for it to be an advice column. The tagline has always been “Ideas, Business, Stories.” Sometimes it’s not about business, sometimes I fail to shape a decent story, but I always try to center the content around ideas, which comes first for a reason. Nothing in these words other than keeping me in practice between books is more important to me than causing people to think harder and test those thoughts in ardent dialogue and discussion.
I’ll admit, too often I’ve delved into the realm of advice. I won’t apologize for that per se, because I’ve heard from many of you over the years struggling with similar challenges that extracted bits of this advice have led to course corrections, strategic realignment, saving a customer, or even circumventing the unneeded pain of a failed initiative without key learning. If the reading material was helpful, great. If not, perhaps at least I got you to reconsider the ordinary.
What is better than advice and where I’ve hoped to steer a lot of these words? That would come back to ideas, and that would be anchored in inspiration.
With advice, we often suggest what to do and when to do it.
With inspiration, we better suggest why something is worth rethinking and how perhaps to approach a framework for effective resolution.
Never was this clearer to me than in a candid panel discussion at my latest college reunion ostensibly about third acts in our lives. Understand this is a collection of oldsters whom I would be so bold as to characterize as not yet ancient. This group now has four decades of life and career under its belt post-college, with all the setbacks and curveballs we are certain everyone else is likely to encounter. In simply introducing this panel, the moderator found several of the participants rejecting the very premise of the panel in asking: Why does any life have to be structured in three acts? While that framework might (or might not) work at times for commercial storytelling, what relevance does it have to most human arcs, which are infinitely more nuanced?
Yes, it was that kind of discussion. The ideas that emerged were worth the nitpicking.
Key among those ideas for me, and quite a surprise at that, was the somewhat common theme that all the diverse participants shared in acknowledging most of the advice they received throughout their lives as well-meaning but demoralizing.
Wait, huh? If you know people genuinely care about you, or at least give them the benefit of that doubt, why would the advice offered too often hurt more than help?
Again, the commonality in response was striking: Advice considers the general case rather than the personalization of the specific case. Indeed, if the recommended advice worked for you in your set of decisions and you were happy with the outcome, that’s terrific. It’s more than terrific if you navigated a complex maze to get safely and successfully to where you wanted to be. What relevance is it likely to have for me? Much less than you think.
In these cases, the advice individuals received from people close to them centered on career, family, self-realization, medical and health problems, losing loved ones, even planning for retirement. The standard expressions of get an education, get a starter job, climb the ladder, pursue a family, invest wisely, and confront demons as they emerge all seemed too pat in hindsight. Get an education to you might not be the same as get an education to me. Find fulfilling employment, even gainful employment, again proved a landmine of difficult-to-connect dots.
The biggest problem seemed to be that rejecting advice could insult the advice-offerer, but more troubling, cause the advice-offerer to segue from advice to criticism. To the extent this set of unique, highly motivated fellow travelers at difficult junctures in their lives wished to hear criticism… well, you can imagine how that kind of rejection lands. Feedback opens the door to curiosity, which fuels the exploration of a theme and extends two-way dialogue. Even the tiniest implication of judgment can shut it down.
Instead of advice, the panel craved peer interaction, within and across disciplines, within and across life stages, to light a torch that could lead them through opaque corridors and dark tunnels. To some extent, this means active listening combined carefully with real-time conversation, avoiding the trap of prescriptive solution crafting. It is precisely the inspiration of those exchanges that people found most useful in designing and committing to better outcomes. It’s the difference between canned narrative touting relatively obvious answers and imaginative moments of shared realization. Advice was predisposed to be narrow. Inspiration was ceaselessly unlimited.
Still think we’re nitpicking? I don’t think so. I’ve written many times that in my own worldview, the course of our lives often comes down to four to six invisible forks in the road. As Yogi Berra liked to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The problem with these invisible forks is just that — you don’t know you’re there when you are. We understand our relationships and careers in hindsight way better than we plan them forward. We can point to those stunningly revealed forks looking back. We can’t necessarily know that a decision we make today will affect our lives for decades to come.
If you are potentially at one of those invisible forks, and you start to explain it to someone, the advice they offer you (“Why, yes, you have to take that job”) is as likely to be wrong as right. Throwing darts would probably get you better results because at least the dartboard is unbiased. On the other hand, if the dialogue we enjoy at those potential forks causes us to think differently and make a decision we are comfortable living with right or wrong, the interaction is likely to be memorable and long-term laudable. It’s the difference between practical direction, which is somewhat hierarchical, and empathy, which is bonding.
All of this is to say if any of my advice in these passages has been useful, I am happy I didn’t blow it. If it has been thin and irrelevant, or worse, demotivating, I do apologize. On the other hand, if any of the ideas here have lifted your spirits to encourage better decision-making, I am humbled. My goal is not to articulate what I think you ought to do. My goal is for you to feel great about your choices and decisions. If I have stretched your notion of possibility along the way, then the words did the job I intended.
To my aging classmates, thank you again for the inspiration. You got me to rethink my own sense of purpose in a manner only you could achieve. I’ll try to repay the favor going forward with the precious time ahead we can still share.
Those lyrics were written by Bob Dylan around 1973. I was in the sixth grade when it was released, so hey, I fit the bill. If I could quote the entire song here without violating copyright, I wouldn’t have to write the rest of this blog post. There you go, blame the copyright laws for making me try to find the words to reflect on the inspiration of a Nobel laureate.
I’m experiencing a moment of sentimentality, but allow me to position that as a positive. Last weekend my wife and I saw the musical Girl from the North Country, which is a collection of more than twenty Dylan songs wrapped around a rather grim story of a boarding house full of exhausted souls during the Great Depression. It’s a a curious pastiche, but from what I can tell Dylan endorsed it. The penultimate number is Forever Young. You don’t need to know more than that — just that this song landed a powerful blow on me at an opportune moment, which is what an impossibly eternal song never ceases to do.
Dylan wrote the song for his children. It has popped up in every context imaginable over the ensuing decades. Google it, the impact is vast and varied. This month it is speaking to me.
A few weeks ago my niece got married on a beach in the rain. She and her fiance looked every bit the part of a couple starting on the next phase of their journey. You can’t help but see the light in the eyes of young love and remember when you stood where they stood. Your youth is your superpower. It is filled with hope, promise, aspiration, and authenticity. The older generations invited to share in the celebration see themselves in the eyes of the betrothed. We are aware of our age, but that isn’t what runs through our minds when vows are exchanged. We try to connect the now to then. In that moment, we remain forever young.
I happen to be on my way to a college reunion. It is a milestone that can be divided evenly by too many integers. The decades behind can’t help but denote age, it’s the underlying purpose of the occasion, to bring together in the present people who learned from each other in the past. Recently my classmates started posting photos of themselves from that time long ago, before mobile phones, digital cameras, and electronic image archives in the cloud. Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away! That’s borrowed from Paul Simon for anyone not of a certain age. Yep, those photos have been sitting in envelopes from mail-in film processing, pasted up in laminated albums stashed under beds, now succumbing to scanning technology and <gasp> social media. I look into the bright eyes of students I knew when Reagan was president and I am convinced they remain forever young.
I look at the conflict in our nation and as hard as I try I barely recognize the place I thought it would become. I talk to my dad about living through World War II as a child and his dreams as a third-generation American for the broadening perspective he believed was ahead for all of us. I’m not sure he realized how idealistic he was as a young man, not fully comprehending the scope of the Civil Rights movement as it emerged all around him, but certainly not expecting to hear so many of the angry expressions currently creeping back into the vernacular. When we sit together now at baseball games, I remember being a young boy also sitting with him at baseball games wondering if the world could be any more perfect than watching Al Kaline catch a deep fly ball to right field on the warning track to end an inning. Today at the games we share, I wonder if my dad in his mind sees himself the way I see myself, not our current age, but with the idea that the life then ahead of us would always be driven by imagination over conflict. In those shared moments of retained dreams, we remain forever young.
Age is real. None of us escapes it. Some of us navigate its trials better than others. It can be genetics. It can be lifestyle. I’d like to say it can also be attitude but like so many my age I’ve seen too much to crawl under that blanket. What I do know is that inside each of us is that very wish Dylan asked us to preserve. It’s there for as long as we remember it, revitalize it, rekindle it. Our bodies will slow, maybe even our minds will slow, but our vision of what we can be is ours to infuse with resonance, To see ourselves in those earlier years can carry us into a more profound, more hopeful, more caring, and more empathetic present for as long as it lasts.
That is the song I am hearing right now and it’s blasting on all channels in stereo.
Spring offers a time time of hope. The metaphor of winter cold easing to the warmth of spring is powerful, with leafless branches returning to bud break and darker days becoming brighter. It is a time when vast numbers of people around the world celebrate some of the most important religious holidays. Inspiring themes of resilience and renewal surround Easter, Passover, and Ramadan. It should be a time of joy, a stage for diverse perspectives that open our minds to new goals we can share.
In the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, it would seem that sense of possibility could be real. While good fortune has transpired for some, we know too well there are shadows on our highest hopes. We long for justice that too often remains elusive. Where is the rainbow breaking through our current clouds?
Here are four aspirational wishes I hold this spring, that I hope can unite us, that seem tangible if we put our differences aside for the greater good, but clearly are a long way from our reach:
May we soon achieve a peaceful resolution in Gaza, with all of the hostages released, an end to the violence, and a new beginning for Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.
May we soon achieve a peaceful resolution in Ukraine, with self-determination of the Ukrainian nation supported by the global community, and an end to the invasion brought on by an autocratic despot.
May the U.S. Congress set aside petty bickering and short-term political volleying to establish a reasonable, sustainable, practical, empathetic, and humane policy for immigration.
May the U.S. Presidential election not deteriorate into chaos, hyperbole, manipulated falsehoods, dishonest rhetoric, and instead show the world that representative democracy can be conducted with integrity and is still possible as a respectable form of government.
Those lofty wishes have consumed my consciousness all through this troubling winter. May that heartfelt meditation now turn to collective imagination, with spring in the air and visions of hope always worth our dedication and service. I wish to be writing with increasing hope as spring turns to summer and we discover the best in ourselves and always each other.
CorporateIntel 